


Abort, Retry, Fail?

by regentzilla



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, Slight Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6585727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regentzilla/pseuds/regentzilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Otacon found himself looking at the duffle bags of guns under the beds and spare parts for everything under the sun – including Raiden himself – scattered around the apartment much differently, now that he had Sunny's warm weight in his arms and her tiny, curious, very easily injured hands grabbing at his shirt.</p><p>On the last night of their journey across the country to the Nomad, Snake and Otacon and Sunny spend the night at one of Raiden's safe houses. There's one last project Otacon needs to finish before they can leave the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abort, Retry, Fail?

Raiden's latest safe house was far from the most questionable place Snake and Otacon had ever stayed, but it still left Otacon bristling with discomfort. He found himself looking at the duffle bags of guns under the beds and spare parts for everything under the sun – including Raiden himself – scattered haphazard around the apartment much differently, now that he had Sunny's warm weight in his arms and her tiny, curious, very easily injured hands grabbing at his shirt.

“Looks like you've really embraced the bachelor lifestyle.” Dishes clattered as Snake cleared enough room in the sink to rinse who-knew-how-many-days-old coffee out of the pot and refill it. Otacon glanced at Raiden across the kitchen table they were seated at, hoping he was being subtle.

“Sounds like you're jealous,” Raiden quipped back, voice a perfect deadpan, “considering you're about to become a victim of settling down.” There was something off about his manner – he was clearly feigning something, although it was hard to say exactly what. He had one of his backup prosthetic legs in his lap, cleaning the socket out with baby wipes that his claws threatened to tear through despite a careful touch. The leg was flesh-toned and slender, a steel-and-plastic civilian design that stood out against the military grade of the rest of his body. His usual one was away for maintenance, he had explained, while Snake and Otacon stared agape at his new body (Otacon slightly more so), as if the mismatched leg was the surprise. 

“We are not settling down,” Otacon huffed, adjusting Sunny in his arms. She was watching the conversation unfold, eyes focused squarely on whoever was speaking. She had yet to say a single word herself, despite being well past two years old. More than a few times Snake had caught Otacon researching developmental milestones, downing coffee and scribbling out pages of notes late into the night like a cramming college student.

“So why the sudden move to a permanent base?”

“It's still mobile,” Otacon protested.

“When was the last time you stayed in once place for more than six months?”

Otacon looked down at Sunny, bouncing her gently on his knee, not for her benefit but because he sincerely couldn't recall and not answering was better than conceding. The new base in question was a decommissioned military Nomad that he got for comparative peanuts. Not quite ideal, Otacon had admitted when he tried to justify the late-night purchase to Snake the morning after, but better than dragging a child – their child, he had emphasized – through a dangerous network of bolt holes whenever they had to be somewhere.

Raiden displayed a gracious amount of mercy and let him dodge the question. He turned his gaze over to Sunny as well, expression instantly melting from a faint teasing smirk to a warm smile.

Snake tapped against the empty carafe with a spoon to get the room's attention, then pointed the utensil at Sunny. "Shouldn't she be asleep by now?"

Otacon jumped at the reminder, standing and carrying Sunny over to Snake. “Absolutely! It's your turn tonight, right?”

They traded their respective cargoes carefully, leaving Sunny squirming in Snake's arms and Otacon holding the empty coffee pot. “Guess it is now.”

“I have some things I need to finish before we leave,” Otacon said, fumbling with the unfamiliar coffee machine, “altitude isn't exactly kind to standard computer cooling systems, because of the air density–”

Snake silently exited the kitchen with Sunny, making an escape for the spare bedroom that had already been emptied of weapons and swept for other miscellaneous child hazards, leaving Raiden to be Otacon's audience for what was sure to be a riveting explanation.

Sunny had trouble falling asleep on a good night – on bad nights she would stay awake crying and squirming until she exhausted herself and passed out. This was not going to be a good night, Snake could already tell. They'd been in a different apartment every night for a full week on the way to the Nomad, each lodging sporting a new and exciting set of dusty, smoky, ratty furniture and carpeting from a whole spectrum of long-gone eras of interior design, and unfamiliar places always set her off. She squirmed and fought until Snake was genuinely tempted to admit defeat and go have a cigarette.

Even before his shadow blossomed from the doorway over the delicate curl of flowers on the wallpaper, Snake picked up on the fact that Raiden was nearby. His feet made more noise against the carpet than Snake had ever heard him make in the past. He wasn't sure if that was because Raiden had dropped his defences, or if staying stealth mission quiet just wasn't something he could do anymore.

In contrast, it took Snake a moment to realize that Sunny had stopped fussing, lying still and looking with tired eyes at the doorway where Raiden stood. More and more often it seemed little things managed to slip past Snake – it was nothing serious ( _yet,_ a dark part of his mind supplied, and he shoved it back down), but he was coldly aware of what could happen if something small escaped his notice in a more lethal situation.

“Having some problems?” Raiden said, voice little more than a whisper.

Snake grumbled.

Raiden leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms over his chest with a faint clink and rub of metal. “I'll stay, if you want.”

Snake glanced back at Sunny. She was putting up a valiant effort in her fight against sleep but her eyes were finally beginning to close, and she didn't react at all when Snake stood, the movement letting the cheap mattress bounce back to fullness as it was unpinned from under his weight.

“You sure?”

Raiden nodded, then tucked a few loose strands of blonde behind his ear. The arc of his arm and the way his fingers curled were awkward, an artificial and calculated movement and not a comfortable one– Snake wondered how long it would take Raiden to get used to mundane little gestures, things that wouldn't be covered in training or physical therapy. “Just this once.”

There was a finality in his tone that Snake didn't know how to interpret. “Going somewhere?” he tried.

“There's something I have to do.” Snake definitely didn't know how to respond to that, and the set of Raiden's mouth and the stern hardness in his eyes seemed to warn him away from trying. 

Sunny was asleep by the time Snake left the room, and the rest of the apartment was left silent and empty. The coffee was already gone, and there was a stained mug with a mouthful of cold dregs in the bottom lying in the sink. It seemed Otacon was planning to work well into the night.

It didn't take long to locate the missing engineer – a quiet, thoughtful hum in the distance was all Snake needed. The sound lead him to a room attached to the narrow hallway, one that Raiden hadn't mentioned in the grand and lengthy tour of potential child hazards. There was a note stuck to the door, scrawled in pungent permanent marker on a scrap of printer paper. Snake squinted as he read it.

“'No clothes zone'? Really?”

Otacon's voice was muffled by the door but the indignance was loud and clear. “I'm working with really delicate electronics, Snake, even static electricity could fry the entire thing! No clothes!”

"Not even underwear."

"Absolutely nothing!" A pause, and Snake could almost see him nudging his glasses back up his narrow nose with a fingertip. "I didn't think you even wore..."

Snake sighed and started stripping, tugging his shirt off first. "I don't. Just wondering what I need to brace myself for."

Otacon grumbled while Snake left his shirt, jeans, and socks in a pile on the carpet. The seldom-used door's hinges squeaked the instant he touched the handle. The room looked like Raiden was using it as storage – it wasn't much larger than a closet and the floor was scattered with boxes of clothing and stacks of books and loose papers. Otacon was sitting in a circle of carpet in the middle of it, a clearing in a forest of clutter, cross-legged in front of a frazzled metal box full of wires and exposed circuits propped up off the floor by two thick stacks of books. There was a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a desk lamp on the floor pointed like a floodlight over whatever it was Otacon was wrists-deep in.

Snake crossed his arms and leaned back against the doorframe. “Sunny was having trouble falling asleep.”

Otacon sighed and nudged his glasses up far enough to scrub at his eyes. “She always does. I think it's all the moving around, she can't get settled into–”

“I said she _was._ Until Raiden came and stood by the door. As soon as she saw him she curled up and fell asleep, no problem.”

Otacon's expression brightened in surprise for a moment before he realized exactly _why_ Raiden was a comfort and his eyebrows scrunched back downwards. “She remembers him...”

A moment passed in complete silence, then Snake gestured with one hand at the mess on the floor in front of Otacon. “What's with the robot that doesn't like clothes?”

Otacon frowned. “I told you, it's delicate!”

“What's it even supposed to do?”

That was all it took to change the subject, and within moments Otacon was sparkling with the thrill of an explanation.

It took about fifteen seconds for Snake to lose the thread of the one-sided conversation, something about a remotely controlled assistance robot, and Otacon was already stuck into a tangent. Snake took the opportunity to slide his gaze along Otacon's naked body while the latter was busy chattering about programming body language into the box of wires on the floor. The gap between them physically was narrowing, Snake noticed not for the first time. Otacon certainly wasn't a glistening Adonis, but he seemed to be inching towards fitness. His body was a far cry from what it used to be – his ribs were no longer visible, his collarbones were tucked deeper away from the surface of his skin. His broad shoulders no longer seemed out of place, like a sturdy coat hanger supporting a damp shirt. He looked healthy.

"That makes it so most of the movement happens naturally as the unit balances itself. A few animations would be pre-programmed and triggered manually, like using a soundboard – Snake."

Snake grunted to indicate that he was listening.

Otacon barrelled on like there had been no interruption. “To turn it on you just press the action button–” he reached carefully under the robot's chassis, to a spot Snake couldn't see, and with a click the unit whirred to life, fans spinning and a light somewhere in its belly blinking as it booted up.

“Metal,” Otacon said, enunciating, “introduce yourself.”

“Yes sir,” came the tinny reply, a voice that was quite clearly Otacon's pitched up and re-tuned. “Pleased to meet you. I am Metal Gear–” a whir of hard drives – “MARK TWO ALPHA. I am programmed to be your personal assistant.”

“Metal Gear...”

“It's a bit late for rebranding, I know,” Otacon said, pressing the action button again to put the unit back to sleep, “but this one is exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

“What's with the creepy voice?”

Otacon rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “That part's definitely a work in progress, I haven't recorded anything but the introduction. It's for Sunny... I'm pretty sure she knows what we're saying, but since she hasn't started talking on her own, I thought she might be able to use it as a proxy.”

“Seems pretty complex for a kid to be using.”

“To tell you the truth, most of the code in this is hers. I'm just fitting it with a basic AI and a body. And a voice, of course.”

“Wait, what do you mean 'hers'?”

“Well, the hardware is mine, obviously,” he gestured between himself and the robot, sitting dishevelled and exposed on the floor together, “but not much of the software is. If I took another Snake...” he paused and adjusted his glasses. “Bad choice of words. If I took someone exactly your height and stood him on your shoulders, the two of you wouldn't even be half as tall as this code would be if it were printed in books and stacked up. Standard size books, I mean, eight and a half by eleven pages in single spaced nine point Times New Roman.”

“And Sunny wrote most of it?”

Otacon got a bright, ready-to-explain look in his eyes. “Not exactly... her brain did. You know how neurons work, right?”

“I get the concept, yeah.”

Otacon held up his hands, palms open towards Snake and slender fingers splayed in front of his face. “Sunny was hooked up to an enormous network of AIs and server rooms and individual computers, maybe even a few other brains. The structure stretches across the entire United States, and there's definitely more than just one. Those structures are hooked up to the Patriots' main players. It's like outsourcing server space.”

“But the space they're occupying is, potentially, humans.”

“Exactly. Brains have something that computers just can't supply. Sunny might have been the only one, or there might have been more. I can't imagine signing up for something like that–” the thought seemed to genuinely send a chill through him – “anyway.” Otacon tucked one of his thumbs into his palm. “Sunny was part of the cerebral cortex. Or the equivalent. The part of the structure handling the complex thoughts and the consciousness of one of the AIs. One tiny part of the structure failing didn't bring the whole thing down, no engineer worth their salt would ever let that happen, especially with something so important.” He wiggled his remaining extended fingers. “So whichever AI Sunny was a part of is still kicking, but it's not what it used to be.”

“And the code?”

Otacon's hands fell. “She's been used to process Patriot information since she was a baby,” he said, sparkling attitude suddenly gone. “Even alone her brain is an absolute powerhouse. All it took was nanomachines and a computer and an idea.”

“She can do all this,” Snake nudged his chin in the direction of the Metal Gear on the floor, “but not talk?”

“That comes hand in hand with being a powerhouse. While she was hooked up to this big fake brain, her real brain developed unevenly, which is probably why she can process digital information but not talk, and why she's so clumsy.”

Snake nodded. “No need for conversation when your conversation partners are other neurons.”

“And no need to walk when you're in a preservation tank.” Otacon paused for a long few moments, trying to put into words the thought that was dragging his face into a frown. “I'm glad that we have something in common already, but... I feel bad for being happy about it. I mean, it's a result of trauma, not just a coincidence.” He stopped and sighed, burying his face in his hands, fingers behind his glasses. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“What is?”

“The whole thing. Parenting. You'd think evolution would figure out something better than this, it's so unintuitive. What options are there? You can run headfirst into it without knowing if you're doing something wrong, until the whole thing crashes, or not try at all."

"Otacon..."

"Even nature's critical error handler is terrible, it's no wonder we couldn't get it right–"

"Otacon!"

Snake's barking voice was enough to snap Otacon out of his increasingly panicked and nonsensical tirade, but he looked very lost for a few moments.

"Listen. If it's the only thing you can do, then do it.”

“She's not just a problem we can throw hypothetical solutions at, she's a human being!”

“So are we.”

Otacon let out the same long-suffering sigh he always did when Snake made a particularly compelling point. 

“Still. What if we end up making her horrible?”

Snake's expression didn't change. “I'd say you're proof that bad nurturing doesn't cause bad kids.”

Otacon breathed out a laugh. “And you're a pretty good case against nature. As far as sticks go we both pulled short ones, and we ended up... decent, I guess.”

“Decent sounds good enough for army work.”

Otacon chuckled, pulled his glasses off, and rubbed the sore corners of his eyes, the one part of tiredness that caffeine couldn't stave off. The dry delivery of Snake's jokes was always funnier on less sleep. “Snake! She's not army work, she's–”

A heavy knock on the door interrupted Otacon's sentence, and he jumped and stared wide-eyed at the door. Snake raised an eyebrow and glanced sideways at it.

“Please,” Raiden's voice said, quiet enough that he wouldn't wake Sunny, “tell me you're not in there doing what the sign and the pile of clothes suggests you're doing.”

That made Otacon laugh again. “No, don't worry, it's an electronics thing, I can't risk any static.”

“Sure,” Raiden replied, but his tone carried his skepticism loud and clear. “I'm going to go keep an eye on Sunny. If anything happens, come get me.” Both Snake and Otacon understood that to mean that he would be standing at attention in front of her door for the rest of the night.

Otacon opened his mouth to reply, but Snake spoke before he could. “Thank you.”

The silence on the other side of the door suggested Raiden was as surprised as Otacon. “Anytime,” he finally said. “Goodnight.” His uneven footsteps on the carpet receded until they were inaudible, and Otacon looked away from the door and back up at Snake.

“He's probably not so glad about it,” Otacon said, barely more than a whisper, “but I'm glad he got a second chance, even if it's a rough one.”

Snake nodded. “Maybe that's what Sunny is.”

Otacon's mouth opened and closed several times as he floundered for something to say, but he finally just nodded and stared down at the Mark II sitting guts-open on the floor.

“And I think that thing is proof that you're making the most of it.”

Otacon nodded slowly. “I mean, I'd love it if she didn't need this. Maybe if we can get her talking before it's finished I can make it into an assistant for you instead.”

“Only if you scrap the voice first.”

“Oh, don't worry,” Otacon said, delving once more into the insides of the Metal Gear. “If you inherit it, I'll install a screen and talk to you through it myself. You get the real deal.”

Snake crossed his arms over his chest. “It's a compromise, but I guess I can live with it.”

Otacon took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, pressing into the corners of his eyes until spots pattered against the backs of his eyelids. “You should go to bed and get some sleep. Raiden has the Sunny situation under control, and I'll be here all night getting this thing closed up and ready to fly.”

Snake hummed. “I could use a midnight smoke.”

“Snake!”

“A midnight nicotine patch,” Snake corrected, deadpan. “I guess I'll be doing all the driving tomorrow.”

Otacon put on an apologetic grimace and looked up at Snake. “Sorry. I'll owe you one. Put on another pot of coffee for me on your way through the kitchen?”

“Sure.”

Snake turned to go, but Otacon spoke and he froze with his hand on the doorknob. “You think we'll be okay once we get to the Nomad?”

“I think we've survived this far, so why not. Every day's a fresh start, right? Don't get worked up about it.” He knew Otacon too well. With that final parting thought, he was gone, door clicking soft behind him. His clothes rustled as he pulled them on and then he was silent again, Otacon's Snake-trained ears only catching two or three footsteps before they disappeared.

“Yeah,” Otacon said, talking into the Metal Gear, head tilting thoughtful. “A fresh start.”


End file.
